Critics generally agree that Too Late the Phalarope, while often overshadowed by Cry, the Beloved Country, is Paton's best work. At the time of publication, reviewers were already recognizing it as superior to its predecessor.

In his 1953 review, Harold C. Gardiner wrote that the novel is a "much more tautly drawn tale" than the first. He added that it is compassionate, while remaining "strong and manly, and manifests . . . a deeply felt realization of the moral plight, of the agony of soul of others." Nicholas H. Z. Watts of Durham University Journal commented that Too Late the Phalarope "matches the elegiac beauty and power of the earlier novel and the intensity of Paton's most recent one [Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful] and deserves greater recognition than it has yet received." Similarly, Kirsten Holst Petersen observed in Reference Guide to English Literature, "Paton is . . . at his very...